3 Decades Later, Finnair Pilots Report Dramatic Close Encounter With a Missile

jones_supa (887896) writes It has come to light that a Finnair-owned McDonnell Douglas DC-10 passenger jet narrowly avoided being shot down by a missile while en route to Helsinki 27 years ago, claimed the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat on Sunday. The two co-pilots, Esko Kaukiainen and Markku Soininen, describe how the event happened during a routine flight back to Helsinki from Japan in December 1987. When the plane was crossing the Arctic Ocean, a missile appeared in the distance. The crew thought it was a Russian weather rocket on its way into space, but the missile began heading straight towards the aircraft. Just 20 seconds away from a collision, the missile exploded. The captain, who was resting at the time of the incident, never officially reported the event. The question of who fired the missile has never been definitively answered. But the pilots believe it was launched from either the Soviet Union's Kola Peninsula or a submarine in the Barents Sea. They speculate that the missile could have been a misfire or that the plane was used as training target.

Comments

Nice timing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably coincidence that they remember it at this time.

Finlandization is moral debasement

[Anonymous Coward]

There are people who recommend Finlandization as a policy. They are terribly misguided. It's a form of moral debasement. It leads to secrecy and lies. It's not a valid policy. If it had continued for a few decades longer, we'd probably have joined the Soviet Union voluntarily. It was a form of slow national suicide.

Re:Finlandization is moral debasement

[CptPicard]

There really seems to be something going on about that comment, I don't know what it is. It's probably the "national suicide" formulation that is a negative trigger for some people who do not understand the background; but national suicide really was what the USSR about for its constituent peoples. If it wasn't forced relocation, it was branding anything "Fascist" that wasn't pro-Soviet enough.

There were certainly positives to our ability to keep the Soviets at bay and maintain our democracy during the Cold War; President Kekkonen in his younger days was a remarkable diplomat and statesman, and being overtly uppity would have just triggered "help" from Moscow. But I can well understand the deep frustrations of those people who just wanted to call a spade a spade when it came to our "friend" to the East.

The really bad part is that Finlandization works across generations in a culture; we're still sheep, scared of the displeasure of those we consider our superiors, and all too afraid of and eager to participate in the collective shoutings-down by people who believe they're superior because they're in the ideological in-crowd. The Stalinists won at least when it comes to that.

Re:Finlandization is moral debasement

[jhol13]

You and GP are so wrong. There is no chance Finland would have "voluntarily" joined Soviet Union. I am willing to bet at least 70% of the population would have rather went to fight in a war than join SU. Sure a lot though the best policy for Finland is to have very close political and economical ties to SU, but joining ... no way.

Then there were no cencorship, none at all. Sure the press, and especially government owned YLE, did have a strong bias and they did suppress bad publicity, but there was no censoring done by the government. The suppressing bad was not the worst, there were huge amount of overly positive articles, TV and radio shows, etc. of the "marvellous things Soviet Unioin accomplished" - quite a few colored or total lies. For example the (Finnish) Greens of that time repeated the lie that "there are no environmental problems in SU" - later the horrible pollution was of course revealed.

Re:Probably US Navy missile

[Anonymous Coward]

And USA would be? Don't be an idiot. It was the Russians.

Re:Probably US Navy missile

[greenbird]

Here's something I don't know the answer to: Do air-to-airs or ground-to-airs have any sort of range safety feature like rockets, or do they just automatically blow up at the end of their runs? Or both? Or neither (in which case why did it blow up?)?

In that era, yes. I beleive most anti-aircraft missle systems in that era were semi-active radar guided missiles which require a ground based radar to paint the target. Most likely there was a safety system where if the painting radar shuts down the missle destructs. Even air to air radar missles (e.g. Aim-7 Sparrow) required the firing aircraft to keep it's nose pointed towards the target aircraft to keep it painted. I beleive the Aim-54 Phoenix was one of the first missles with self contained terminal guidance.